RonMayfield-Oracle

I believe an Information Architect’s primary purpose is to increase the value of the information assets belonging to an organization.Securing and making information available is no longer sufficient to grow the competitive capabilities of an organization.Information architects must get:

the right information

to the right person

at the right time

in the right format

so the best decisions can be made at all levels of the organization.

To assist Information Architects in understanding and defining a process to increase the value of information assets, I have created an Information Value Lifecycle map.This is the first step in understanding the characteristics of information on the way to building Polyglot Persistent Architectures.

Building an Information Value Lifecycle map is done in 7 steps.

Step 1 – Build the Information Value Lifecycle map layout.Each organization has multiple levels of decision making.For each level of decision making, there are Information Usage patterns and the Information Structures needed to support the usages.The example below starts with the Transaction Owners, the staff that create, maintain and own the transactions required to run the business.At the highest level are the CEO and Board of Directors (BoD).Maps will differ to reflect each organization’s hierarchical process of decision making.

Step 2 – Define the Information Usage patterns and the Information Structures needed to support the Information Usage pattern.

Typically different levels of decision making require different levels of aggregation and summarization of information – from simple transaction reporting to cross line of business and industry aggregations, analytics and predictive analysis.Information architectures over the years have evolved well know sets of information structures (most commonly 3rd Normal Form, Star, Snowflake and Cube schemas) needed to support these Usage Patterns.

Step 3 – Define the processes needed to transform and aggregate information from transactions to the highest level of the decision making process.

Extract, transform and load (ETL) processes move information from one level of decision making to the next based on the information usage patterns.Mapping these ETL process at a high level ensures data linage is understood and information accuracy is guaranteed.Some applications provide capabilities ‘jump’ the information past some levels to the highest levels of the decision making process.Oracle Hyperion is an example.

Step 4 – Record Master Data Management usage patterns

Understanding Master Data usage patterns gives insights into which types of information are most important to an organization.They also indicate the level of information management maturity – more usage of master data reflects an understanding of the value of master data and a willingness to invest to realize that value.

Step 5 – Identify Big Data usage patterns

Most organizations have begun the process of deploying and realizing the value of Big Data.Recording Big Data usage patterns shows the maturity of an organization in relationship to their ability to adopt and deploy new technologies.

Step 6 – Identify the ‘Gold Nuggets’ in Big Data

Identify where Big Data data mining and analytics has increased the quality and/or quantity of information inputted into the Information Value Lifecycle.These processes are commonly referred to as finding the ‘Gold Nuggets’ of information that were previously not known.It’s important to understand the value of the ‘Gold Nuggets’ in the decision making process of an organization to justify the level of effort and expense of deploying Big Data architectures.

Step 7 – Identify new Big Data information value opportunities

The low cost of some Big Data architectures has allowed organization to capture new sources of data that have lead to new ways of doing business.Many of these use cases include social media as a way of judging the success of marketing campaigns and new product lunches.Capturing these Big Data opportunities shows the agility and innovativeness of an organization.

Polyglot – Knowing or using several languages.Persistence – A coding technique or technology used to store information.Polyglot Persistence – Storing information in multiple information management technologies to meet a business requirement.

Today an information architect has a wide array of information management technologies available to solve business problems. 451 Research published a Data Platform Map in June 2015 that identified 277 information management products in 18 categories.

Three forces have contributed the explosion of information management technologies:

1. The enormous amount and types of information generated on the internet and by connected devices,2. The reduction in the cost of compute and storage platforms per a unit of processing capability and,3. The explosion of open source products for specific information management use cases.

Together, these forces have provided the opportunity for information architects to collect data onto low-cost platforms that only a few years ago would have been deemed too high-volume, too low-value and too expensive to capture. Hence we are now in the era of Big Data – high-volume, low-value data that can be cost effectively researched, explored and mined. But experience has shown that the value of Big Data is multiplied many times over of it can be combined with high-value information in existing systems to enhance the quality of decisions made throughout the organization, i.e. solving the Polyglot Persistence Puzzle. This daunting task falls to the Information Architects. It is the Information Architects that must lead the era of Big Data into the era of Polyglot Persistence for organizations to take full advantage new types of information and information management technologies.

But with this new era comes the need for new ways and methodologies to solve the inevitable Polyglot Persistence Puzzle.

In this series of blog articles, we will introduce and explain such a new methodology – Oracle Information Characteristics Architecture Method (ICAM). ICAM measures 16 information characteristics and 8 usage patterns to evaluate and value information to assist Information Architects in making the best information management technologies decisions, i.e. the right tools for the right job. ICAM has been developed with input from many Oracle information management thought leaders from around the world. We have also worked with a handful of beta customers to implement and refine ICAM with very positive feedback and results. My colleague, Bill Wimsatt, and I will post several blog articles explaining and walking through the process of implementing ICAM and showing the value of using this methodology.

The next ICAM blog article ‘Why solving the Polyglot Persistence Puzzle is so important today – The Information Value Lifecycle’.

Bill Wimsatt is a Senior Business Technology Professional with a broad background combining business and IT strategy, execution, and program management. He has over 25 years experience in business and IT strategy and business optimization.

Ron Mayfield is the Senior Enterprise Architect specializing in database and information architectures at Oracle. Ron has been a professional in the IT industry for 30 years and an employee of Oracle for the last 26 years.

Bill and Ron will be presenting ICAM at the Open Group Towards Boundaryless Information Flow™ in San Fransisco on Wednesday, January 27, 2016, at 9:00 – 9:45pm. Their presentation is titled ‘Developing Information Architectures via Business Capabilities and Information Characteristics’.